Wednesday, May 05, 2004

Who are we becoming? Among the corrosive lies a nation at war tells itself is that the glory -- the lofty goals announced beforehand, the victories, the liberation of the oppressed -- belongs to the country as a whole; but the failure -- the accidents, the uncounted civilian dead, the crimes and atrocities -- is always exceptional. Noble goals flow naturally from a noble people; the occasional act of barbarity is always the work of individuals, unaccountable, confusing and indigestible to the national conscience. This kind of thinking was widely in evidence among military and political leaders after the emergence of pictures documenting American abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. These photographs do not capture the soul of America, they argued. They are aberrant. This belief, that the photographs are distortions, despite their authenticity, is indistinguishable from propaganda. Tyrants censor; democracies self-censor. Tyrants concoct propaganda in ministries of information; democracies produce it through habits of thought so ingrained that a basic lie of war -- only the good is our doing -- becomes self-propagating.... The American leaders' response is a mixture of public disgust, and a good deal of resentment that they have, through these images, lost control of the ultimate image of the war. All the right people have pronounced themselves, sickened, outraged, speechless. But listen more closely. "And it's really a shame that just a handful can besmirch maybe the reputations of hundreds of thousands of our soldiers and sailors, airmen and Marines. . . . " said Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Sunday. Reputation, image, perception. The problem, it seems, isn't so much the abuse of the prisoners, because we will get to the bottom of that and, of course, we're not really like that. The problem is our reputation. Our soldiers' reputations. Our national self-image. These photos, we insist, are not us. But these photos are us. Yes, they are the acts of individuals (though the scandal widens, as scandals almost inevitably do, and the military's own internal report calls the abuse "systemic"). But armies are made of individuals. Nations are made up of individuals. Great national crimes begin with the acts of misguided individuals; and no matter how many people are held directly accountable for these crimes, we are, collectively, responsible for what these individuals have done. We live in a democracy. Every errant smart bomb, every dead civilian, every sodomized prisoner, is ours. And more. Perhaps this is just a little cancer that crept into the culture of the people running Abu Ghraib prison. But stand back. Look at the history. Open up to the hard facts of human nature, the lessons of the past, the warning signs of future abuses. These photos show us what we may become, as occupation continues, anger and resentment grows and costs spiral. There's nothing surprising in this. These pictures are pictures of colonial behavior, the demeaning of occupied people, the insult to local tradition, the humiliation of the vanquished.... Look at these images closely and you realize that they can't just be the random accidents of war, or the strange, inexplicable perversity of a few bad seeds. First of all, they exist. Soldiers who allow themselves to be photographed humiliating prisoners clearly don't believe this behavior is unpalatable. Second, the soldiers didn't just reach into a grab bag of things they thought would humiliate young Iraqi men. They chose sexual humiliation, which may recall to outsiders the rape scandal at the Air Force Academy, Tailhook and past killings of gay sailors and soldiers.... Are we decivilized yet? Are we brutes yet? Of course not, say our leaders.  9:44:39 PM

Meanwhile, outside Bush's bubble... When President Bush told Arab television viewers Tuesday that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners "does not represent the America I know," he sailed into a powerful current of thinking in the Middle East and around the world that holds exactly the opposite view: torture and humiliation of others is the American way.... In a front page column for the Iran Daily, a reformist newspaper in Tehran, columnist Mohammad T. Roghaniha wrote, "What is unfolding in [Paul] Bremer's Iraq more or less resembles the black days when U.S.-backed military dictators ruled in Latin America."... Distrust of U.S. motives runs deep in the Middle East. Bush's assertion that those responsible for the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison will be punished rings hollow in the Arab world and many believe exposure of the abuses is merely another aspect of American treachery.... Muthana Harith Dhari, editor-in-chief of the Iraqi weekly al-Basaer (Visions), believes the U.S. government released the pictures to distract attention from its withdrawal from Fallujah. "If we look at the pictures, what's new in them? ... Nothing," Dhari is quoted as saying. "We know that such savage acts have been going on, and have protested against them to US occupation authorities. But of course the American people did not know, so they released the pictures to divert their people's attention from the Fallujah defeat."... 9:23:51 PM

Media hypocrisy being called out Daryl Westfall of White House, wanted to know why we [the Tennessean] would refuse to publish a Doonesbury cartoon containing a swear word yet continue to run ads for strip clubs in the back of the Sports section. ''I'm no prude,'' Westfall wrote. ''These ads do not offend me, but hypocrisy in the form of hiding behind morality as a justification for censorship does.''... ------- Savannah-area viewers who tuned into ABC-22 Friday night to watch a "Nightline" program airing the names and faces of 721 U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq were in for a surprise. What they saw instead: The Andy Griffith Show.... Some military families, however, criticize the decision and see it as an effort to hide the true cost of war in Savannah, home to Hunter Army Airfield and 40 miles north of the 3rd Infantry Division's home at Fort Stewart. Savannah resident Freddie Lue Gardener, mother of Lt. Col. Randall T. Barnes, who returned home safe from Iraq in February, said WJCL's viewers should have been given the choice to watch "Nightline." "They should have shown it," she said. "You don't have to watch it if you don't want to. It hurts so bad sometimes I can't look at those pictures, but the public needs to know what's going on. We need to know all the news, good and bad. You just can't camouflage it." The broadcaster's decision also raises questions about who was pushing a political agenda – "Nightline" or Piedmont Television. As in the case of Sinclair Broadcast Group, whose executives have donated thousands to President Bush's re-election, records show Paul Brissette, president and CEO of Piedmont Television, is also a regular contributor to Republican candidates. Tamara Johnson, wife of Sgt. Szandrique Johnson of the 3rd ID, said "Nightline" should have been shown, but not without first notifying family members about the program. "I think it's important they do it while the war is going on," she said. "I don't see why these guys who died aren't just as important as the ones over there now."... 8:54:13 PM

Gitmo was the model ...Yesterday's apology by Major General Geoffrey Miller, now commander of the US-run prisons in Iraq, was no more satisfactory than that belatedly offered in radio interviews by President Bush. What has happened cannot be blamed on "a small number of [US] soldiers". The real responsibility rests with the commander himself and the entire chain of authority right up to the president who sanctioned or condoned a system imported from - need we be surprised? - Guantanamo Bay. We now learn that it was Gen Miller who last September, when he was still in charge of the US concentration camp in Cuba, visited Iraq to offer (as the Washington Post puts it) "suggestions on how to make interrogations more efficient and effective". The basic aim, he recommended, was that military detention centres in Iraq should serve as an "enabler for interrogation" and that the prison guards should "set the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees". And that is what they proceeded to do. "They [the guards] made them [the prisoners] do strange exercises," says one of the US civilian employees in Abu Ghraib prison, "by sliding on their stomach, jump up and down, throw water on them ... called them all kinds of names such as 'gays' ... then they handcuffed their hands together and their legs with shackles and started to stack them on top of each other". That is torture by any standard, and equally to the point, a very effective "enabler for interrogation."... 8:15:38 PM

Bush's gulag ...The Bush administration was well aware of the Taguba report, but more concerned about its exposure than its contents. General Richard Myers, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, was dispatched on a mission to CBS news to tell it to suppress its story and the horrifying pictures. For two weeks, CBS's 60 Minutes II show complied, until it became known that the New Yorker magazine would publish excerpts of the report. Myers was then sent on to the Sunday morning news programmes to explain, but under questioning acknowledged that he had still not read the report he had tried to censor from the public for weeks. President Bush, Condoleezza Rice and other officials, unable to contain the controversy any longer, engaged in profuse apologies and scheduled appearances on Arab television. There were still no firings. One of their chief talking points was that the "abuse" was an aberration. But Abu Ghraib was a predictable consequence of the Bush administration imperatives and policies. Bush has created what is in effect a gulag. It stretches from prisons in Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantánamo to secret CIA prisons around the world. There are perhaps 10,000 people being held in Iraq, 1,000 in Afghanistan and almost 700 in Guantánamo, but no one knows the exact numbers. The law as it applies to them is whatever the executive deems necessary. There has been nothing like this system since the fall of the Soviet Union.... 8:04:47 PM